Deep meta-modelling with MetaDepth

Abstract

Meta-modelling is at the core of Model-Driven Engineering, where it is used for language engineering and domain modelling. The OMG's Meta-Object Facility is the standard framework for building and instantiating meta-models. However, in the last few years, several researchers have identified limitations and rigidities in such a scheme, most notably concerning the consideration of only two meta-modelling levels at the same time. In this paper we present MetaDepth, a novel framework that supports a dual linguistic/ontological instantiation and permits building systems with an arbitrary number of meta-levels through deep meta-modelling. The framework implements advanced modelling concepts allowing the specification and evaluation of derived attributes and constraints across multiple meta-levels, linguistic extensions of ontological instance models, transactions, and hosting different constraint and action languages. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.